21 Things You Saw On The Simpsons Before Learning About Them In Real Life
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Simpsons Nostalgia

There has arguably been no show better at holding up a mirror to culture and society than The Simpsons.

With FXX's 12-day marathon featuring every episode of The Simpsons plus The Simpsons Movie wrapping up Monday, now seems as good a time as any to reflect on what the show has given us over the past 25 years and counting.

Full disclosure: I watched a lot of The Simpsons growing up. So much that when my parents were going out, they would measure the time they'd be gone in Simpsons episodes.

The Simpsons covered so much ground in terms of historical, cultural and political references, that by the time you were 10, if you had paid enough attention, you could have a pretty solid primer of pop culture history from the past 30 years or more (it helped if you had parents or older brothers or sisters to explain things to you).

However, a weird result of watching so much of The Simpsons for me, and many others like me who grew up watching the show in the 90s, isthat you often knew the parody of something before you knew the thing itself.

In some cases it just meant you knew the plots of a lot of movies before you saw them. But in other, more important cases, it meant you knew the satirical take on a topic before encountering the topic in real life.

Satire is a powerful way of addressing the evils of society, and in the case of The Simpsons, the show made a lot of important criticisms about society go down like a sugar-coated pill.

I like to think The Simpsons armed a generation of kids with a satirical lens through which to view the world. There's a lot of messed up stuff you encounter as you go along in the world, but knowing how to take away its power with humor is an invaluable tool -- and a boon to your mental state, because if you weren't laughing, you'd probably be crying.

So here are 21 things you probably saw on The Simpsons before you learned about them in real life; and although we may have been naive when we were first exposed to these references, we're a little less naive now for it.

(Editor's note: And of course, this list only includes episodes within the "golden era" of the show, which is roughly seasons 3-9, depending on who you're asking).